Childish Gambino and how the internet killed the cultural critic

Sometimes, a work of art is so urgent, so rich, you need help to understand it. So it was that, on Tuesday, I found myself searching the internet for things to read about Childish Gambino’s This is America. There was no shortage of options. But, with some notableexceptions, they didn’t add to my understanding. I wanted depth. Instead I got listicles.

Floating to the top of my feed was an article in the Guardian: “This is America: theories behind Childish Gambino's satirical masterpiece”. This video is popular, it said, then asked: “But what does it mean?”. Yes, I thought, that’s exactly what I’m here to find out. But instead of an answer, I got a summary of tweets and notes from Genius. No interpretations were drawn, no conclusions reached. Was it a masterpiece? The headline said so, but the piece just linked to tweets by Janelle Monáe and Erykah Badu.

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This type of churnalism is so common it feels harsh, rude even, to single out one example. And of course I know the game – the pressure in newsrooms to tap into a massively viral video, just to make that day’s traffic target. But, still, it jarred more than usual, because of what happened later that day, when the Guardian confirmed it was ending its contract with Lyn Gardner, its theatre critic of 23 years, and the last reliable mainstream chronicler of contemporary British theatre.

Predictably, the Guardian veiled its decision in corporate uplift, writing that, “We have decided to look to add some new voices to our arts coverage.” But anyone who follows theatre – or music, art, architecture, film or books – will see what is really happening. Cultural criticism in its traditional form is dying. It is being replaced by something entirely different: the internet phenomenon known as “fandom”.

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Like the art forms it follows, cultural criticism has always been dying – and in these straightened times, journalists lose their jobs every day. But there is a reason why this is not just (bad) business as usual, but a fatal decline. Simply put: online, people don’t read reviews.

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Internet journalism tends to be marked by a paradox: it has more readers than ever before, only those readers no longer pay as they once did. But, as anyone with access to analytics will confess, that doesn’t hold true for cultural criticism. There are many exceptions, naturally, and star writers and cultural events can still summon a large audience. But readers want to consume art, not consider it. They’ll take recommendations, sure – but reviews? Save your prose for Medium.

While this unpopularity may be disappointing, it is not exactly surprising. In a world of hot takes, criticism is cold, slow and distant. Who wants to hear about a novel they’ve never read or a film they’ve never seen, or, in the case of theatre, a play they will almost certainly never attend? Maybe if you’re planning to buy a ticket or a copy – but then how can you guarantee the review won’t ruin the end? Social media’s spoiler allergy is death to considered criticism of any kind.

Most damning of all, a review is, in the final analysis, just an opinion – and, once everyone can voice an opinion, their value is diminished. If you want to know if a film’s worth watching, then it makes sense to head to Rotten Tomatoes, or let Netflix surface a recommendation. Why put your faith in one voice when you can trust the data instead?

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Even this way of thinking about criticism – as a means of finding cultural products to consume – misunderstands its nature. True, critics rate and recommend; but most of all, they critique, which is something very different. A good review tastes the cultural air, sniffing out the stench of hypocrisy, the sweet smell of truth, the scent of things to come. A good review is generous, or cruel, but never vacillating. A good review is, in its mind at least, every bit as artistically worthy as its subject.

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Or at least it was. Today, the phrase “write a review” evokes not Tynan, Amis and Nussbaum, but Airbnb, Amazon and Tripadvisor. A good review is four stars and above. The algorithm will do the rest.

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Given its now-obvious uselessness, it is worth asking how criticism survived as long as it did. One answer is that in the print era, no-one truly knew who read what. But this seems to imply that, even then, no-one paid attention to reviews, which is not necessarily true. They may well have done, because, in that era, they had no choice. Publishers controlled distribution, so they got to set the rules for everyone

This techno-economic arrangement created the conditions for an entire system of cultural judgement. Artists and their managers accepted the necessity of criticism, because that was the only way to reach an audience. Section editors indulged their highbrow tastes, safe in the knowledge that their boss wouldn’t care as long as the pages got filled. Critics wielded petty power over anyone daring enough to create. Readers? All the ones at the editors’ dinner parties read the review section cover to cover.

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The digital revolution destroyed this cosy media-industrial complex by pulling apart – unbundling, in the jargon – its constituent elements. The largest change came when advertising fell away from what was now referred to as “content”. But for criticism, the sudden separation between commercial and critical success mattered just as much. Publishers always debated the value of reviews versus word of mouth. Now it became clear: artists could get big without having to go through the gatekeepers. With journalism struggling, criticism began to appear irrelevant.

Nature abhors a vacuum. In the space left by criticism, two different economic entities emerged. First, social networks. Second, fandoms. These communities had always existed, but now they were given a voice – and on the supercharged attention economy of social media, that voice mattered. It is an online truism that one per cent of website visitors create content, nine per cent edit, and 90 per cent just lurk. If you have the one per cent on your side, you’re well on your way to success.

Fandoms do provide criticism, albeit of a different sort. For one thing, it’s more likely to be well-informed. George Orwell, a prodigious reviewer, admitted that, “The great majority of reviews give an inadequate or misleading account of the book that is dealt with”, an inevitable consequence of poorly-paid generalists dashing off pieces at the last minute. Fans are obsessives. They know their stuff (and they won’t even ask to be paid). They also have a more creative relationship with the creator, so criticism takes the form of remixes, or fan fiction, or animation, or cosplay. The critic has been replaced by the co-creator.

This system is undoubtedly more fun, diverse and creative than the one it has displaced. Even so, there are losses, most notably independence and impartiality. In this new model, there is only love, hate and aggressively nerdy detail. The idea that you should write from a perspective of Olympian ignorance feels absurdly old-fashioned.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The impartiality of reviewers was of dubious provenance anyway. If they seemed lazy and elitist, that’s because they often were. I once saw an editor of a Sunday newspaper storm into the newsroom to tell a journalist to rewrite a negative review of his friend’s book. (The journalist complied.)

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So what is the future of traditional criticism? Unless something major changes soon, its most likely fate is signalled by that Guardian piece on Childish Gambino. Criticism has devolved into curation of crowdsourced comments; that, or creative misreading as a source of furious hot takes (watch out for “This is America is actually racist,” coming soon to a feed near you). Either way, nothing will derive from the work itself. Everything will be a reaction to a reaction somewhere on the internet.

This is why British theatre will miss Lyn Gardner so much: because, through it all, she performed the most basic act of any journalist, critic or not: bearing witness. She watched, often alone, and she wrote it down. Without her, who will even do that? Discussing her firing, a musician friend told me that he wouldn’t bother inviting critics to his shows, but he needed a star rating to put on his posters. We have killed authority, but made nothing to put in its place.

Already, we see the way in which cultural criticism follows trending topics, a policy that favours stars, controversialists and demagogues. We see, too, the often toxic politics of fandoms rising more frequently to the surface, as with Star Wars or Game of Thrones. What is Trump but a fandom President, brought to power by controversy, pursuing conspiracy theories fomented on message boards, making oblique dog whistle references for fans to pick apart and read into? On and on it goes, circling down and down in a vortex of self-referring imagery. Which, of course, is what This is America is all about.